A’s win; can Dunn acquisition fill Cespedes hole?

Oakland Athletics’ Adam Dunn celebrates in the dugout after his two-run home run against the Seattle Mariners during the first inning of a baseball game on Monday, Sept. 1, 2014, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

If there was ever a team that needed to exercise that age-old baseball cliché and turn the calendar page, it was the Oakland A’s on Monday morning.

After fourteen consecutive months of posting a winning record, the Athletics would very much like to completely forget August 2014. During those 31 days, the A’s went from a two-game division-leading world-beater to trailing the Angels by five games and looking like a team in full collapse mode.

“It was a little ugly and it didn’t end very well, based on the series in Anaheim,” said Bob Melvin. “It’s good to turn the page.”

The A’s turned the page in a big way, against Seattle. Adam Dunn, who Billy Beane once likened to Paul Bunyan, arrived in Oakland after the A’s acquired him on Sunday. And he immediately started swinging a big axe, hitting a towering two-run home run in his first at-bat, jumpstarting the A’s offense and leading the team to a 6-1 victory.

“It was a little bit storybook,” Melvin said.

The A’s had been having a storybook season until last month. The deal for Dunn is a clear concession that something has gone terribly wrong with the team since the trade of Yoenis Cespedes for Jon Lester, on the day before Awful August began.

The A’s, however, don’t buy that theory.

“Lester’s been good for us, ” Melvin said firmly. “It’s nice to have him. Certainly the offense hasn’t been as good, but we weren’t swinging the bat real well right before (Cespedes) left either.”

But Melvin allowed that taking Cespedes out of the lineup changed the dynamic, and other players feel more pressure to produce.

“It was probably a little bit of a shock to them to lose a guy like that,” Melvin said. “But now we have a guy like Adam Dunn, who can effect the lineup as well. ”

Dunn did that instantly on Monday, after a huge welcome from the sold-out Coliseum. Dunn was effusive about the hometown reception, calling it “the best crowd I’ve ever played for.”

As the A’s have bumbled and slipped from their perch as the best team in baseball, social media has crackled with criticism of the trade, that Beane ruined the team, that he overplayed his hand.

I was supportive of the Lester-Cespedes trade at the time and still think it’s a good deal for a few reasons: I admired the go-for-it attitude of a general manager realizing that his team had a real opportunity to get to the World Series, I believe that pitching wins in October and I liked keeping Lester away from the competition. Combine those factors with The Chronicle’s Susan Slusser’s reporting that the A’s didn’t believe they could resign Cespedes and were planning to trade him in the offseason anyway, it seemed like a smart deal.

But it certainly has had ramifications. The trade was made with October in mind and the A’s still have to get to October.

There are some things that Beane can’t quantify on his computer – the intangibles of team chemistry and mental pressures. And those elements clearly were affected after Cespedes left for Boston.

“I think we were more beat down,” Melvin said. “The effort was always there….When you talk about staying loose it’s sometimes misinterpreted as there’s no urgency to what they’re doing.

“That wasn’t the case but there are times when you can press and that’s not playing loose. One of the keys for this team was that it has been playing loose, like they don’t know what the score is.”

Jumping early on the Mariners brought the looseness back. Dunn, who said he was as nervous as he’d been in a long time when he stepped to the plate, was able to participate in the loosey-goosey A’s when he got back to the dugout and had to run through the tunnel of player’ outstretched hands.

The A’s will need to adjust as well. Dunn is such a huge man – at 6-6, 285 pounds – that he was whacked on the head.

“We were all joking that we have to get a tall tunnel,” Jed Lowrie said.

Melvin was also loose after the game, something he certainly hadn’t been in Anaheim, especially after the final game when he was ejected and had to watch the final seven innings on television and then lashed into the team in a closed-door meeting.

Melvin said that watching his team unravel on the screen was disturbing – which means he has a clear idea what A’s fans have been going through in recent weeks.

“It is a different perspective,” Melvin said. “I’m not used to it and I saw some things that needed addressing.”

He addressed them in Anaheim. And Beane addressed the gaping hole in the lineup. And the A’s were finally feeling good again on Monday afternoon.

There’s a firm belief in sports that you don’t mess with a good thing. And Beane messed with a very good thing. The A’s are still a very good team but they have to reconfigure their chemistry and their offense. They started to do that Monday.